Today's Feature Article

5 Trends That Will Shape Small Business in 2010
John Jantsch

2009 was a pretty wild year in the world of marketing.
While social media was building up steam in previous years,
it pretty much went mainstream this past year. In fact,
many businesses became fatigued from hearing so much about
Twitter, Facebook, and social media in general.

As the hype settled and people began to understand how to
use and integrate these new platforms, more change was
brewing. The evolution that was social media in 2009 set
the table for the realization of some significant trends to
bubble up into the world of small business in 2010.

The groundwork for some of these trends has been in place
for years, but I think we will see small business owners
finally start to embrace the following five significant
expansions in the New Year.

1) Real time is big time: At some point in 2010, all search results will consist of
real-time information, scores, reviews, tweets and all,
right there and up to the minute. We’re addicted to up to
the minute connection and we want more. It’s kind of like
the Meryl Streep line in Postcards from the Edge, “Instant
gratification isn't fast enough.”

Most everything we do will be instant. Google Wave wants to
introduce real-time collaboration.

An iPhone app called Shazam will tell me the name of the
song playing on a coffee shop stereo right now. Oh, and I
can buy it on iTunes, right now too.

Another, called Red Laser, will tell me where to get an
item from a photo. It will also give me the best price
available for the item anywhere, right now, from a bar code
scan.

2) Location as plumbing: Imagine standing on a hill overlooking the downtown skyline
and pointing the camera on your phone in any direction and
getting a full tour of what you are looking at, including
restaurant recommendations from friends in your favorite
social network.

Walk into a museum, plug in your headphones and point your
phone at a painting or sculpture. Then, read about it while
a video interview from an expert on the artist loads.

Augmented reality and location aware services have been
around for a while. Now that Facebook and Twitter are
starting to play with geo-location for tweets and update,
enabled by the GPS technology on most every new phone, look
out, it’s going to tip.

Location sharing services like Foursquare, Loopt and Google
Latitude, are already receiving mainstream media mention.
It won’t be long before every rating and review site, such
as Yelp! and Insider Pages, build this into the foundation
and push coupons and discounts out to you based on location.

Anywhere you go you will be able to locate friends nearby
or the location of every Twitter follower in a city you are
visiting.

Your location, or that of your customers and prospects,
will become another data point in the marketing mix.

3) Filtering gets social: Having access to vast amounts of information in real-time
and the stores of data from throughout history are both a
good thing and a bit of a curse. While we can now find the
answer to just about any query, we are pummeled with so
much information that we cannot sift through the good and
bad and true and false.

Filtering and aggregating information became a valuable
skill in the last few years as tools like RSS readers and
search alerts allowed us to subscribe to and collect the
information we wanted to read most.

I believe in the coming year another layer of filtering
will become just as important as search engine optimization.
Look to see search results peppered with recommendations
from our social contacts.

When you search for the best attorney in town, a good movie
or the best place to get some authentic TexMex, not only
will you see the organic search results earned through
Google’s algorithm, you’ll also see what your friend Jimmy
had to say about such things.

Social search has the ability to eclipse the value of
traditional SEO efforts. As more and more information is
added to your social graph, I believe recommendations from
trusted sources in your networks will carry significantly
more impact in some cases than the results that reach the
top spots in organic search.

4) Kitchen sink on the cloud: Will desktop applications and computing become a thing of
the past? While not completely, 2010 looks like the year
that small businesses will truly embrace applications that
exist online only.

Entire software suites such as Google Apps and Microsoft
Office Live will finally allow document, spreadsheet,
database, and presentation software to function as Internet
applications at greatly reduced costs and ultimate real
time collaboration.

File sharing and storage, including total file backup from
tools like Dropbox and Mozy, will become standard in the
small business toolbox.

Project, task, scheduling and collaboration of all manners
have made a dramatic move to the web with tools like
CentralDesktop and Backpack, as remote workers and a global
supply chain have dictated. Look for these kinds of tools
to be routinely used as client service tools that eliminate
the need to drive a few blocks to consult.

Online meeting tools like GoToMeeting, WebEx and even Skype,
with video, will continue to allow people to connect in
richer ways online.

The sacred cow of the desktop, financial data will finally
move online completely as QuickBooks Online. Tools like
Freshbooks make it very easy to do bookkeeping online while
providing secure access for financial employees and outside
accounting resources.

5) Fusion boosts offline: While the entire focus of this article to this point has
been about changes online, the mantra for 2010 will be the
convergence of online and offline for the greatest leverage.

No matter how wired we get as a society and business, there
will always be a need for face to fact trust, building
engagement. Now that small businesses have moved more
online, the smart play will be to find the best ways to
fuse the online and offline activates in ways that make the
return on both even greater.

While LinkedIn and Facebook may be great places to find
prospects and create awareness, they are not always the
best platforms to build relationships deep enough to create
a sale.

Using these platforms to create awareness for content that
resides on your web site or to drive people to events where
they can learn and network in person, will become an
essential part of the marketing process.

In addition, using online tools such as Twitter and Biznik
to further facilitate existing in person relationships,
will become another tool that small businesses will add to
their competitive arsenal. Now when a member of your sales
team meets a prospect at a Chamber of Commerce function,
they may follow them on Twitter and invite them to connect
on LinkedIn as a matter of process and as a way to more
easily communicate, refer and connect, all apart of the
trust building cycle.

Elements of these trends have been brewing for some time
and adoption of any trend generally happens over time and
almost immeasurably. However, now is the time to analyze
the impact these ideas may have on your business this year
and into the future.

********************************
John Jantsch has been called the World's Most Practical
Small Business Expert for consistently delivering real-
world, proven small business marketing ideas and strategies.
John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach,
award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape
Marketing - The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing
Guide published by Thomas Nelson, with foreword by Michael
Gerber, author of The E-Myth and afterword by Guy Kawasaki.
Click here.

*****************************

I believe a little bit of success lies in everyone! Will you be the one to deny that? Or rather be the one who chooses to be guided by it? I hope you choose as I to do the latter!
Josh S. Hinds